Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 82

3 Things Your First Pages Must Have

For an agent, publisher or reader to keep going, your first pages must:

1) establish the main problem or quest

2) make us want to spend time with the protagonist (not the same as liking them)

3) teach us the rules/theme of the book we’re entering.

I’ve read a lot of book beginnings this week, between submissions for today’s webinar, in which Jane Friedman and I will analyze queries and first pages, and finding examples of published books to talk about. Some of what I’m noticing: u...

Communing With Ghosts

By Dallas Woodburn

Why do I write nonfiction? To commune with ghosts.

As a young girl through my teen years, I kept a journal. I addressed each entry not “Dear Diary” but “Dear Auden.” Auden was my paternal grandmother who died when I was five. She was the first ghost I attempted to understand and keep close through writing. Spilling out my dreams, frustrations and heartbreak on those lined journal pages felt like I was confiding in her.

The first personal essays I wrote were abo...

Let’s Get Messy: On Mixing Writing and Life

By Bethany Jarmul

I dreamed of a certain kind of life—of nature walks punctuated by the liquid notes of blue jays and the scurrying of squirrels, of a luxurious Beauty-and-the-Beast-style home library brimming with Shakespeare, Aristotle, Emily Dickinson, of quills and inkwells, of typewriters, notebooks, journals, pens, and smeared ink. I desired the life of Thoreau near Walden Pond or Annie Dillard at Tinker Creek.

I bought into the idea that the best writing is done when sequestered ...

How Seeing a Therapist Helped Me Finish the First Draft of My Memoir

By Heather Sweeney

I knew from the first sentence that writing a memoir about my divorce would lead me down an emotional path I wasn’t quite sure I was ready to revisit. But when I started seeing a therapist to cope with the pandemic, I soon discovered my weekly sessions were serving a purpose I hadn’t intended: coping with my memoir.

When I first dug out the storage tub that housed over twenty years worth of journals and another box filled with old photo albums, I jumped into my p...

Sprachgefühl: Finding the Perfect Word

By Christine Yount Jones

To develop sprachgefühl, Charles Johnson, in his book The Way of the Writer, recommends that writers read the dictionary one hour a day to develop a robust vocabulary from which to choose.

One hour a day!?

The dictionary!?

The parts of speech and etymology sections too? Does an audiobook version count? Is there an audiobook for the dictionary?

I digress.

Sprachgefühl. It’s a nice German word with its impossible umlaut nowhere on my keyboard. So ...

Don’t Rush It

By Morgan Baker

I don’t like being late – to classes I teach or the airport to catch a plane. My anxiety meter goes haywire if I haven’t given myself the time to organize before school or when I’m packing to go away. Will I need my swimsuit? What about those shoes? I allow extra time wherever I go, which means I’m usually early.

My stepfather once told my daughter as he drove her to a summer job, “You’re on time if you’re ten minutes early.”

I’ve taken that to heart.

When my daugh...

How to Write an Essay

By Amanda Smera

Inspired by Sonya Huber

Enter the blank page with your anxieties crumbling up inside you. It’s the healthcare crisis, the meaning of a word that doesn’t sit well with you, the cat that fell from a four-story building and didn’t land on its feet.Write about the answers you seek, the ones you don’t already have. Walk into the unknown armed with your doubts. Let the words pour out of your fingertips in a magical inquiry, in desperate need to find the ones who are lo...

Panic at the Pitch

By Jodie Sadowsky

“El titulo è Panic at the Bus Stop.” The professore, a balding painter in black jeans, handed out sketchpads and pencils and watercolors.

My heart fluttered with panic at the art studio. I peeked at my classmates deftly sketching in the dusty classroom in Florence a few cobblestoned streets from the Duomo.

In keeping with the assignment, the out of proportion, Picasso-like passengers I created were unnerving. Thankfully, they were waiting for the bus, so I didn’t ha...

The Power of the Editor

By Cathy Shields

Forty years ago, while taking a college course in children’s literature, I set out to write a children’s book. But my career as an elementary school teacher interfered, and my publishing dreams evaporated. When I became a mother of a child with a disability, the next twenty years blurred the boundaries between order and chaos.

By the time I took another creative writing class, my children were teenagers, and I was in my late forties. The teacher wielded his pen like...

Stacking Wood and Sentences

By Kelsey Francis

As a writer living in a 100-year-old house with too many windows and not enough insulation, I’ve gotten used to wrapping myself in fleece and wearing a wool hat at my writing desk.  In the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, the temperatures frequently plummet to below zero for months, and you learn to drive on snow packed roads for half the year. As such, we talk a lot about the weather with neighbors and friends and those conversations often lead to an important ...